Final solutions and a rose by another name - EDITORIAL

In December 2022, then incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a visit to Canada made a startling claim -’that the Arabs dispossessed and kicked out the Jews from the land of Israel after they conquered the area in the seventh century.

He denied (falsely of course) the existence of the Palestinian people, calling their historic land a “barren mess - a ruin” before the creation of Israel. He went on to allege that Palestinians only lived in what is now Israel because farms and factories built by Jewish settlers in the 19th century attracted migrant workers from neighbouring Arab lands.

“They reconstructed history and said they’ve been here for centuries - no they haven’t, they weren’t there at all,” claimed Netanyahu in an interview with US journalist Jordan Peterson.
Prior to the holocaust the then German Dictator Adolf Hitler together with Joseph Goebbels - the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party - commenced a propaganda blitz against German Jews accusing them of all manner of despicable crimes including an accusation that ‘Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in ‘World War I’.

Netanyahu’s spurious claims of Arabs dispossessing Jews and driving them out of Palestine sounds very like an eerie echo of Nazi propaganda in the lead up to what later turned out to a the holocaust in which millions of European Jews were rounded up in concentration camps - tortured starved and put to death.

Last week, in parliament, MP Imthiaz Bakeer Markar raised the treatment of Palestinians in the aftermath of hundreds of Iraeli settlers descending on the Palestinian village of Hawarah and adjacent villages of Za’tara, Beita and Burin which are under Israeli military occupation. One Palestinian was killed, at least 409 injured including 90 children and 136 women. Homes and businesses were looted and set ablaze. The Israeli settlers were accompanied by members of the Israeli armed forces who watched the violence unfold.
A leaf out of ‘Kristal Nacht’ perhaps?

West European diplomats visited the scene of destruction and condemned the perpetrators. However there has been no followup remedial action either to stop further attacks or to raise the issue at the UN Security Council. In the Israeli Occupied Territories; especially in the Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians have been ghettoised into enclaves. Bringing to mind the manner Nazi Germany ghettoised Jewish people in German occupied Poland.

As the German conquest of Europe progressed Jews from different parts of Europe under Germany were deported to concentration camps where mass killings of Jews took place. The people of Palestine are crying to the world asking for help to stop the Israeli occupation of their country and the continued discrimination and persecution of Palestinians in their own lands.

No lesser body than the United Nations itself, has accused Israel of imposing an apartheid regime in Occupied Palestinian Territory. Israel also limits water to Palestinians in Israeli Occupied Palestine.(IOP). Amnesty International charges that one of the most devastating consequences of Israeli discrimination against Palestinians are the policies on Palestinian access to water.

According to the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies, the current Palestinian water supply is restricted and limited by Israel. Israel refuses to acknowledge Palestinian water rights and adherence to international laws on water. Israeli’s water consumption is four to six times per capita higher than that of the Palestinians.

Slowly but surely Palestinians are being killed, dispossessed of their lands and homes, ghettoised, subject to apartheid and starved of water needed to keep body and soul together. For how much longer is the world going to look askance at what appears to be a plan to exterminate Palestinians in their own lands? Simply condemning atrocities against Palestinians by Israel is not helping the cause of these long suffering people.

The system of apartheid in South Africa was not brought to an end, simply by condemning the actions of the apartheid regime. It was only after economic sanctions, sporting sanctions and other similar punishments were imposed, did the regime in South Africa end its brutal policies. 

Is the world going to watch in silence, while a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem is seemingly being imposed? When the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) blocked water supplies to the villages in the Mavil Aru area, the Sri Lankan government was forced to crush the terrorists responsible. Isn’t it time, the countries of the world stood up to those terrorising the people of Palestine and end Israel’s occupation of that land and it’s people.
A rose by any other name, the English adage goes, smells just as sweet. In the case of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, it smells fetid.